Getting It Out There – Sharing!

March 31, 2010 ~ LINUS FERNANDES

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[tweetmeme alias=”http://tinyurl.com/y9tehkd”%5D

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In my second post about blogging, per se, I would like to touch upon something that every blogger wishes that his reader would do – Share! And by this I mean share the post he/she found interesting with his/her social circle.

But for that to happen, the blogger should make it easy for the reader to do so! And when I mean easy, it should not take more than 2-3 clicks of the mouse to do that!

One of the features you would like is the ability to share your post on social bookmarking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

[picapp align=”none” wrap=”false” link=”term=social+networking&iid=7237041″ src=”8/c/c/8/Closeup_of_a_88e4.jpg?adImageId=11914126&imageId=7237041″ width=”500″ height=”333″ /]

Now, for sites such as Blogger and self-hosted WordPress.org sites, this is quite simple. For WordPress.org sites, which is meant for technically minded individuals and recommended for commercial blogs, the availability of installable plug-ins is the only way to go!

But in the case of sites such as this, which are shared across the WordPress.com platform, the only way to go is to use a good blog composer such as Live Writer with its plethora of plug-ins that can make your job easy.

For Windows Live Writer, the 2 ways I would recommend to embed social bookmarking tags in your post are either using the free Get Social client application and pasting the generated tags into your post’s source or using the Windows Live Writer plug-in provided by Rahul Soni at DonNetScraps.com. The Rahul Soni provided plug-in is a work in progress and I personally prefer using the GetSocial application generated tags (with some tweaks of my own) simply for its completeness.

How about making your web-site accessible to readers in different languages?

Creating a link to one of the online translators such as BabelFish, Google Translate or Microsoft Translator is an easy way out.

Finally, we come to Twitter again.

Since the Twitter mania seems to feed on itself, we cannot avoid it and neither can WordPress.com, it seems. WordPress.com users have access to the shortcode tweetmeme that embeds a widget that allows your reader to retweet your post to Twitter.

That’s about it for now w.r.t blogging!

Have a great day!

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Getting It Out There – I

Quote of the day:
The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth. – Edith Sitwell

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Getting it out there

February 27, 2010 ~ LINUS FERNANDES

In an earlier post, I mentioned not writing about blogging!

Well, this post is about just that!

Obviously I would like more people to read my posts, increase my sphere of influence that is!

And how do I get the message out there?

Rely on social networking sites, simple isn’t it?

But then all the people I know do not log on to the same networking sites. Quite similar to how it works in real life, we don’t all go around in the same circles, do we? Not all the time, that is. Would we want to? Don’t we price heterogeneity? If we were all the same, would we network? There is a price to pay for homogeneity, but that is not the theme of this post.

There is also a place and time for homogeneity, as there is a place and time for heterogeneity.

So how do I get my post out to the other networking sites?

For me, LinkedIn, Facebook and more recently Twitter are the 3 main sites to target.

LinkedIn for my professional needs.

Facebook because it has become the most popular social networking site

and Twitter because I believe that it has become the biggest killer app on mobile phones. I do not have the stats to back up that claim though!

This blog is hosted on WordPress and WordPress is a PAAS i.e. Platform As A Service for non-technical (and technical) persona to avoid the hassle of setting up their own blogging web-site. It works like a charm!

But then there’s also Yahoo! 360 , Windows Live, Ning and Orkut , these cannot be ignored either!

Obviously hand-coding links for these sites is a painful and tedious process.

Here’s where technology comes to my aid!

If you sign on your WordPress admin console and go to my the Tab My Blogs , there you can enable feeds for Yahoo! Updates and Twitter using the instructions given. You would of course need to have a Yahoo! and Twitter a/c respectively.

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/publicize-twitter/

For Facebook, the procedure is slightly different. Facebook features a micro-blogging facility called Notes (Facebook’s answer to Twitter). This allows you to host a blog on Facebook itself or import your existing blog. I chose to do the latter. You may do the same. This automates your posts to Facebook , admittedly with a tolerable lag.

WordPress has now introduced support for Facebook’s Publicize feature. Log in to your WordPress admin , select tab My Blogs and check Facebook to activate publication of posts to your Facebook profile. This automates publicizing posts to your Facebook a/c as well.

You may choose to use Windows LiveWriter , (like I do) to write and post your articles. If you go to Blog –> Edit Blog Settings , you can set up Live Writer to post to Windows Live an update each time you post to your blog. That takes care of your Windows Live updates. Funny how Microsoft integrates so well with its own products. I’m not complaining though!

For LinkedIn, there are a couple of apps, namely the Twitter status imports and a WordPress app, These can be featured on your profile. So LinkedIn is now clued in as well.

Ning has another 3rd party app for WordPress, that allows imports from your specified blog. This will do the trick if you have a profile on Ning.

Orkut has no direct way of inserting your posts. Here, again Twitter comes to the rescue with a 3rd party app that pulls in your Twitter feeds. 3rd party apps are great, aren’t they?

Now with Google Buzz, which integrates directly with your Gmail account and contacts, all you need to do is click on connected sites, enter your user details for your WordPress and Twitter a/cs , and voila!, your posts and tweets are now being buzzed on Google.

I haven’t considered MySpace, Friendster (is it still around?) and WAYN in this post simply because I have discontinued my a/cs on these social networking sites.

So now you know how to! I just love automation!

Have a good day!

This post updated for Ning, Google Buzz and Facebook Publicize.